achievements, balance, buffs, malygos, nerfs, Patches, sartharion, three drakes

Now that we’ve seen the changes in action, I can give a brief summary of our observations raiding this week on how it all panned out. For the guilds out there trying to min/max and stay at the forefront, keeping on top of changes is very important. Not just reading about upcoming changes, but evaluating recent changes and utilizing them to maximize your raid.

DPS

• Hunter: Survival is definitely the top of the pile now. This is  great relief to our hunters who generally much prefer Survival over Beast Mastery. The absolute maximum DPS hunters can put out is maybe 5%-10% lower than it was before, however this high DPS was reliant on pets which are notoriously unreliable. Survival is far less dependent on the pets.
• Mage: At worst, it’s as high as it was before with less variance. Under the right conditions, it can be even higher thanks to the arcane spec becoming top dog in potential damage dealt. If you supply arcane mages with enough mana they will do obscene DPS. This DPS is high enough that my nerf sense is tingling. Exploit it while you can.
• Elemental Shaman: Extremely buffed. They are going from the bottom of the list to near the top. We still need to see this in action in 25 mans, but they are top of the list in 10 mans constantly and doing very well in 25 mans. Blizzard said their intended goal was for them to match Moonkin DPS and it seems like right now that they are exceeding Moonkin DPS by at least a few percent and possibly up to 5-10%. The exact numbers still need to be pinned down, but expect good elemental shamans to be making a strong showing.
• Rogue: Still sucks. I feel for them if Blizzard waits until 3.1 to fix their DPS.

Healing

• Priest: The sky isn’t falling, Holy is still viable and still a strong performer. However, the rest of your raid needs to adapt to not being able to lean on CoH as much as it did before. Most people probably didn’t even realize how much their healing strategy was crafted around relying on CoH to handle the majority of incidental damage. The raid was just *full*. Not so anymore and other heals are having to pick up the slack.
• Druid: Prior to this patch there was two rough camps of druids. Those who spammed the  ever loving shit out of Wild Growth and those who didn’t. Wild Growth is the poor man’s CoH but it could still inflate your healing numbers. For those who relied extensively on Wild Growth you will have to get used to filling a larger percentage of your casts with other heals. For those who didn’t, nothing has changed.
• Shaman: Yaaay you can Chain Heal again without getting your heals sniped left and right by CoH. Chain Heal will once again be in high demand as it remains the main un-cooldown encumbered multi-target heal.

Encounters

• Sartharion with Three Drakes is more difficult. The changes to Twilight Torment put a lot of additional pressure on your raider healing. They also force you into either using a Death Knight tank or using other tanks with a lot of cooldown support from healers to survive the huge breaths. This makes it more difficult from a coordination perspective as well. The Twilight Changes only affect the choke point of the fight but this is also the place where most of the wipes will happen so even though it seems like a minor change it’ll still be a huge factor to contend with for guilds learning the fight.
• Malygos in Six Minutes isn’t as hard as I thought it would be. You basically kill the sparks as they come in. Pop bloodlust 10 seconds after the first vortex and transition him before the second vortex. If you can transition him to phase 2 before the second vortex then you can almost certainly get the achievement. You should be able to get him down below 35% before he flies away. Don’t suck at phase 2 or phase 3 and you’re good to go. We killed him in 5:30 though we didn’t get the achievement because we forgot to wait for the timer to reset from the prior attempt. The strategy page at StratFu - Malygos in [Six] Minutes is updated if you’re looking for more specifics.

Summary

Raid DPS is overall slightly higher, raid healing output is slightly lower, and most everything else is the same. From an individual perspective, things may not have changed or may have changed greatly, but from an overall raid perspective things are mostly the same. We haven’t cleared Naxx this week but that’s not usually a difficult thing to do anything. We’ve done Sartharion 3D, Malygos in 6 minutes, and I personally did an 8 man Naxx that got Undying (priest and shaman healing).

achievements, buffs, malygos, Patches, sartharion, three drakes

As usual, there’s undocumented changes in this patch. Most undocumented changes get dug up elsewhere, but raid changes tend to not be found until the patch actually goes live because no one is testing raid content on the PTR unless it’s a new zone. Here are the changes, I’ll keep this updated with new finds:

• You Don’t Have an Eternity: The timer was increased to 6 minutes but you can only have two sparks at a time. This makes the achievement significantly more difficult just due to DPS requirements. I would say that being overgeared for the encounter is now basically a requirement to get the achievement. I’m not entirely sure how feasible this achievement is with the gear currently available.
• Sartharion with Three Drakes: You can no longer remove Twilight Torment as described in The Twilight Torment Dance. This means you absolutely must handle the huge breaths that can hit for up to 75k with cooldowns. This definitely makes the fight more difficult and places more emphasis on DPS to get Shadron down as soon as possible. This also means that you raid will be taking a lot more damage while Twilight Torment is up because everyone will always have the additional 75% multiplier instead of just having it half the time. This change combined with the nerfs to Wild Growth and CoH should make the fight significantly more difficult.

sartharion, Tactics, three drakes

I finished up the video of our third Sartharion kill with three drakes up (so long! ‘Sarth3D’ is so much better) today. It seems to be getting great reviews, which is always heartening: it took at least 50 hours to produce. It even got featured on Warcraftmovies.com as their movie of the day.

Warcraft Movies: Sarth25 + 3: A Tutorial

And, of course, a strat page to go with it:

FuStrats - Sarth3D

There’s some things the movie just doesn’t cover well enough due to the medium. The strat page also contains a complete transcript of the movie for anyone hard of hearing or who just wants the reference.

raid leading, sartharion, Strategy, three drakes

I’ve Never Been Here, Is This Boss Hard?

I mentioned in my last post that we often have to learn things the hard way because we are working on content without strategies or documentation. In this age of live streaming broadcasts, full strategies before content leaves the Public Test Realm, and detailed write-ups within a week of release, the opportunity to see content in this virgin state is limited to a very small number of guilds. The process of learning can be very fun and very frustrating. click here to read entire article

sartharion, Tactics, three drakes

A lot of guilds are beginning to work on Sartharion with three drakes up (affectionately referred to as Sarth 3D) and having fun trying to figure out how to live through 75k breaths on their main tank as well as all the other raid damage going out. Currently the hardest fight in World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, this is the pinnacle of raid progression. click here to read entire article